“That was unnecessary,” whispered the Lieutenant, full of hatred, standing up. “Anyway, I have always loathed your daughter.”
The Rittmeister groaned. He attempted to rise and strike the brutal odious face, but his legs were trembling, the room turned round and round and he had to hold on to the table. In his ears the blood roared like breakers on the shore—his daughter spoke from far away. Has she no pride at all? he thought. How can she still talk to him?
“Oh, Fritz! why have you done this? Now everything is ruined. Papa knew nothing.” He was looking at her with his clear malicious eyes, full of contempt and disgust.
She advanced round the table; it did not matter to her that she was in a public place. She seized his hand, she implored him: “Fritz, be kind.… Papa will do everything I want. I will talk him round.… I can’t be without you.… Even if I see you only once a week, once a month, we could still be married.”
He was attempting to withdraw his hand.…
Her eyes were large with anxiety and tears. She was trying to collect herself. With an attempt at a smile she said: “I will convince Papa that it’s all a mistake. He didn’t know about it at all! He must ask your pardon, Fritz, about the wine.… That was very horrible of him. I swear to you he will beg your pardon.”
“How do you mean, your father didn’t know?” he asked. “He was talking about the letter, wasn’t he?”
Thus his first words to her were a cold suspicious question, the sole reply to her stammering appeal.…
But she was happy to have him speak to her again; she pressed his hand, that bony cruel hand, and spoke rapidly. “Papa was talking about a quite different letter! I wrote to you again, about the arms, because the forester had seen you burying them. And the letter was intercepted. Don’t look so terrible, Fritz! Fritz! The arms are still there.… I haven’t done anything wrong, Fritz. Please.…”
She had spoken louder and louder, and now he put his hand over her mouth. From behind their newspapers the civilians had emerged to observe the scene with embarrassment, indignation or amusement. At his table the Rittmeister moved as if in sleep. “Let my daughter alone,” he murmured. And believed he had shouted this. The waiter had taken a step toward the couple and now stood unable to make up his mind whether to interfere or not. …
The Lieutenant, however, now understood everything: the absence of the officers this morning, the broken-off communications with the Reichswehr.… He perceived that the whole
His hand still on her mouth, he whispered in her ear: his hatred for her submissive face flamed higher every moment. “You,” he whispered, “you’ve brought me only misfortune. I loathe you. I wouldn’t want you even if you were smothered in gold. You make me sick. I shudder when I think of your whining. I could tear myself to pieces when I think that I once touched you. Do you hear? Do you understand?” He spoke louder, for her eyes were closed and she hung as if lifeless from his arm. “You have ruined everything for me with your cursed filthy love. Listen, you!” He was shaking her. “Listen well. If the weapons are still there, then I’ll take care to get killed tomorrow. But if they’ve been found, I’ll shoot myself this afternoon—because of you, do you hear? Because of your magnificent love.” Triumphantly, full of hatred, he watched her. For a moment he grew confused; she hung so lifeless on his arm. But he still had something else to say to her, even though the waiter was shaking him roughly by the shoulder. In her ear he whispered: “Visit me this evening, do you understand, darling? There! I’ll look nice. All your life you shall think of me lying there—with a smashed skull!”
At her scream everyone started up, rushed forward.
The Lieutenant looked around, as if waking up. “There, take her! I don’t need her anymore,” he shouted to the waiter and released the girl so suddenly that she fell to the ground.
“Hey, pick her up at least, you!” yelled the waiter furiously. The Lieutenant, however, was already running from the inn.
V
The Lieutenant, he did not know how, had reached his small hotel; to stand in his room looking at the distempered walls and listening to the babble downstairs in the bar. “Be quiet!” he shouted with a face distorted by fury; but the bawling continued. For a while he listened, seeming to hear Violet’s humble, imploring voice. The whimpering of a slave! Damnation! He pulled himself together, drank a glass of stale water, looked round and noticed the pieces of field-gray uniform hanging up. He could not make up his mind how he would go “there,” whether in uniform or in mufti. For a long time he considered which would be more correct, but could not decide.
“Life’s a curse,” he said, sitting down. But now he could not keep his thoughts on the question of what to wear; it occurred to him that he had been ordered to go with his men at nine that evening to fetch the arms from the dump. There was no compulsion for him to have a look at the place beforehand. If the arms were gone, well, it was just as bad at nine in the evening as at midday—he need not have known about them. The Rittmeister and his daughter would keep their mouths shut, for dirty linen wasn’t washed in public. Scornfully he grinned at the thought of how dirty for the daughter this linen was.
“What a swine I am! What a swine!” he groaned, though he did not really mean it. In the end he was no lower than life had wished him to be. There he sat, head in his hands, the Don Juan of villages, the mysterious Lieutenant Fritz, as swift to act as to love. Flesh and hair, the smell of powder and the hot taste of long kisses— that had been his life—the smooth, cool stock of a weapon in his hand, the smooth, cool limbs of girls under their clothes, the blaze in the sky from a village set on fire—but also the eternally consuming flames in his body. Cold- bloodedly he could set on fire the farm of a Haase, if it suited him, but he could also spring into a blazing stable to fetch out the horses. That was the man he was, and he could not be any other.
Because of that, he would not wait till evening to make certain of the arms dump. No, he would go at once, and if all was lost there, then he was lost too, exactly as he had told that damned girl. He knew well that to many he was a man of questionable honor, one used by the Major only because he was suited to certain missions; but he had his own sort of honor and did not choose to be dependent on the silence of a Fraulein von Prackwitz.
He jumped up, his irresolution gone. From the cupboard he took out a suitcase and burrowing beneath the dirty linen in it fetched out his pistol. The safety-catch was up, but it was loaded from that time before—he remembered very well—when he had driven that little stinking beast Meier in front of him. He threw his case down at his feet—he was indecisive, a coward!
No, he had had no luck with her; she was associated with nothing but tremulous figures. Cowardly Meier, Kniebusch the chatterbox, that scoundrel of a Rader, the idiotic father who thought it was the thing to throw wine in other people’s faces and was then prostrated by his own heroic deed. And the most tremulous of all, the girl herself, with her romantic pretensions to love. “I can’t live without you!”—when every man in Neulohe and in the world could have given her what he himself had!
There was a knock. Swiftly, before calling “Come in,” the Lieutenant slipped the pistol into the roomy pocket of his knickerbockers. But it was only Friedrich, the boots, come to announce that Herr Richter had sent round to ask if Herr Fritz would drop in on him at once.
“Yes, yes, that’ll be all right, Friedrich,” said the Lieutenant with the greatest ease, although in his heart he cursed.
Very punctiliously and with a firm hand he parted his hair before the mirror, attentively observed by Friedrich who, of course, was also in the plot, though only as a minor hanger-on. In the mirror the Lieutenant was watching the face of his rear-rank man; it was as if kneaded out of clay, a coarse face, with a shapeless nose. Nevertheless its expression was unmistakably anxious. He made up his mind. “Well, Friedrich, where’s it burning?” he asked with a smile.
Friedrich looked at the Lieutenant in the mirror and said hurriedly: “The town has been put out of bounds to the troops.”
The Lieutenant gave a superior smile. “We know all about that. That’s all right, Friedrich. Did you think they’d let the men into the town beforehand, so that they could get drunk?”
Friedrich nodded a slow agreement with his shapeless head. “I understand that. But Herr Lieutenant, they say—”
“Do you listen to what people say? Then you have to listen to a lot, Friedrich.”
“But—”
“Oh, shut up! It’s all rubbish. We people obey and do our job.”
